Image

4J Studios

No splitscreen mining for SDTV owners
12 years ago

No splitscreen mining for SDTV owners

Folks who can’t pony up the dough for an HDTV are up in arms over the lack of splitscreen  gameplay in Minecraft. It’s not broken or anything–at least that’s what they say. But SDTV players are entirely locked out of any splitscreen games, the option only available if your console is hooked up to some sort of HD output, Kotaku reports. It’s left some players on the Xbox.com forums completely clueless as to the problem, while others up in arms. It’s something that most reviews, including our own, didn’t catch–so yes, SDTV gamers are few and far between.

We’ve spoken our distaste about this recently, but this goes far beyond not being able to read text. This is locking players out of major features, players who spent money with no warning they’d be locked out. Players who are confused and mad. Take a look at just a few of the complaints below.

Read More

Minecraft on sale for $15 USD today at Best Buy *EDIT* Expired
12 years ago

Minecraft on sale for $15 USD today at Best Buy *EDIT* Expired

By  •  News

Is 1600 MSP too much for you? Residents of the United States can pick up Minecraft today for $15, the equivalent of 1200 MSP. Head on over to BestBuy.com …
Read More

XBLA Wednesday: May 9
12 years ago

XBLA Wednesday: May 9

By  •  News

The day has finally arrived this XBLA Wednesday for all your building and recipe-making craft hands. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition finally hits XBLA today at 1600 MSP. You can …
Read More

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Version review (XBLA)
12 years ago

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Version review (XBLA)

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Version was developed by Mojang and 4J Studios and published by Microsoft Studios. It is released May 9, 2012 for 1600 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Minecraft 360

If you’re any kind of gamer, odds are you’re at least tangentially familiar with Minecraft. If you’re unfamiliar, a brief synopsis: You’re dropped in the middle of a seemingly endless world, left to fend for yourself. Just about everything in the game world can be deconstructed, reconstructed and combined to rebuild the world around you as you see fit (think of it as a world made entirely of LEGO blocks). When the sun goes down, though, the monsters come out to play – and when that happens, you’d better have some weapons or shelter to fight back (you remembered to build a sword, didn’t you?).

In a way, Minecraft is the quintessential open world game: The player is left to his or her own devices without that pesky story campaign getting in the way of the fun. When the game first released on PC in 2009, it became a sensation for its simple-yet-deep gameplay – and the fact that you could build anything from a scale replica of The Legend of Zelda‘s game world to virtual representations of human anatomy didn’t hurt either. Now, the game makes its long-awaited debut on XBLA: Does it retain the simple charm PC gamers have enjoyed for years, or is it lost in translation?

Read More

PAX East: Getting ready for Minecraft
12 years ago

PAX East: Getting ready for Minecraft

It’s almost a certainty that many of you have played Minecraft. However, somehow both myself and my intrepid colleague Nick Santangelo missed out on one of the most popular indie PC titles of the last few years, so we weren’t quite sure what to expect when we stepped up to the booth at PAX. Turns out, there’s a lot of mining, then a lot of crafting.

If you’ve played Minecraft before, go ahead and skip the next couple of paragraphs. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what you can expect in the first thirty minutes or so. You start out in the middle of a blocky, 3D world, with nothing but your own two hands to rely on. Right off the bat you have the ability to make a few things. After a bit of hacking away at the local foliage and, well, the ground, you’ll be able to build a workbench, which in turn unlocks other things to craft. Building those things unlocks more stuff, and so on.

It’s not all fun and games though, you’ll need to build shelter if you want to survive. At night, creatures attack, and you want to be safely in bed when that happens. Luckily there are plenty of options for the industrious (literal) homemaker, from windows and doors to torches for your walls.

Read More

XBLA version of Minecraft to receive DLC
12 years ago

XBLA version of Minecraft to receive DLC

By  •  News

The XBLA port of Minecraft will be getting DLC and updates post-release, says Roger Carpenter, lead Xbox Live Arcade producer at Microsoft Studios Europe. Responding to an XBLA …
Read More

Minecraft preview: Now I get it
12 years ago

Minecraft preview: Now I get it

I told myself I would never play Minecraft as I have this incredibly easy ability to become quickly addicted to something. To put it in perspective, I’m the guy who watches entire series of TV shows straight through in a day, not just seasons. I’ll try and fail for hours at a game like Super Meat Boy or Trials HD until I can get through sections perfectly. When I started Skyrim, I had eighty hours put into the game before I even remembered to start the main quest. When I fell in love with XBLA games, I helped start this website. So it was no surprise when I finally picked up a controller to play Minecraft an hour passed by like nothing had even happened.

Read More

Minecraft won’t get Kinect support until post-launch
12 years ago

Minecraft won’t get Kinect support until post-launch

When Mojang’s Minecraft launches on XBLA, supposedly later this month, it will do so sans Kinect functionality, according to statements made at Microsoft’s Spring Showcase event. However, 4J Studios — the team responsible for the Xbox port of the popular world-building PC title — has plans to eventually patch support for Microsoft’s motion controller in at some point after the launch.

Roger Carpenter, lead producer of the XBLA version, told Eurogamer that there is good reason for the delay. They were afraid that if they crammed Kinect controls in on day one, there was a chance they would “for want of a better phrase, mess it up,” Carpenter explained. “Minecraft’s so dear to so many people that we had to nail it on a controller, and on Xbox.”

Read More

Minecraft developer commentary shows split-screen crafting

With the recent news of a March release sometime for Minecraft on XBLA, we just got hold of a new developer commentary of the game from IGN. If you’ve …
Read More

Rumor: Minecraft building up for a late March release?
12 years ago

Rumor: Minecraft building up for a late March release?

By  •  News

Hookshot Inc recently got the skinny on the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade version of Minecraft, revealing new details on the blocky smash hit and a potential release date. The …
Read More